Many moons ago (7 years ago), i wrote a little RTS inspired by Dyson/Eufloria. I actually contacted the Eufloria guys before doing so and offered them to write a multiplayer mode for them. They politely declined and allowed me to write a clone with MP support. So that’s what i did.

After 2 months of work, Quantum was complete. We played it a lot at work. It got around 20k downloads from around the web after making my rounds on a few websites (TIG, JGO, etc.). Eventually, interest faded away and i forgot about it.

Fast forward to today. I was thinking about writing an RTS again. I remembered Quantum and started searching for traces of it on the web. I found a video and shortly after that a fork of the original source.

I forked the fork and started reviving it. A few hours later, it’s ready for you to shame my code from 7 years ago 😀 Here are features that might interest you:

Multiplayer via a latency-adaptive lock-step simulation, with thousands of units, inspired by the old 1500 Archers article

Scripting via BeanShell, a very old but super lightweight scripting language for the JVM. Here’s the complete AI.

A map editor

You should NOT take the code structure as a big inspiration! Code style, architecture and especially the graphics part (mixing fixed function and programmable pipeline) are NOT good. However, there’s a lack of fully open-source games out there that are more than a simple 2D plattformer, so i thought i’d share.

This release contains a major change to the build system. I had to change the way the iOS project handles native libraries. Up until today, the ios/build.gradle file had a two tasks, copyNatives, and updateRoboVMXML. When you import your project into an IDE or build it via the CLI, these tasks will walk through all dependencies, extract the static libraries and rewrite your robovm.xml file. That’s not really nice.

This release fixes this long standing issue. iOS native libraries, e.g. for gdx code, freetype, bullet or box2d, are now packaged using RoboVMs Jar layout for native libs. The static libraries are stored inside a jar, in the directory META-INF/robovm/ios/libs. Additionally, a small robovm.xml file is stored in META-INF/robovm/ios/robovm.xml. This file specifies the native libraries in the libs directory that RoboVM should link.

If you update an existing project to libGDX 1.6.1, you need to make a few changes to the build.gradle and ios/build.gradle files of your project!

In the root build.gradle file, you will see something like this for the iOS project:

You need to change the natives config name to compile, just like what we use for the normal Java dependencies.

In the ios/build.gradle file, can remove the copyNatives and updateRoboVMXML tasks and any other line that references those tasks. You should end up with something like this (modulo your main class name!):

After this changes, simply set the gdxVersion in your root build.gradle to “1.6.1” and you are done.

Here are the full CHANGES for this release:

[1.6.1]
- Added optional hostname argument to Net.newServerSocket method to allow specific ip bindings for server applications made with gdx.
- Changed the way iOS native libs are handled. Removed updateRoboVMXML and copyNatives task from ios/build.gradle. Instead natives are now packaged in jars, within the META-INF/robovm/ios folder. Additionally, a robovm.xml file is stored there that gets merged with the project's robovm.xml file by RoboVM.

ROBOPODS

In other news, if you are interested in libGDX plus iOS you should cast your vote for RoboPods. RoboPods are bindings to 3rd party libraries like Admob, Google Play Game Services and so on that we at RoboVM will officially support going forward. See this blog post, including the poll.

[1.6.0]
- API Change: GlyphLayout xAdvances now have an additional entry at the beginning. This was required to implement tighter text bounds. #3034
- API Change: Label#getTextBounds changed to getGlyphLayout. This exposes all the runs, not just the width and height.
- In the 2D ParticleEditor, all chart points can be dragged at once by holding ctrl. They can be dragged proportionally by holding ctrl-shift.
- Added Merge button to the 2D ParticleEditor, for merging a loaded particle effect file with the currently open particle effect.
- Added ability to retrieve method annotations to reflection api
- Added PixmapPacker.updateTextureRegions() method.
- Added ability to pack "anonymous" pixmaps into PixmapPacker, which will appear in the generated texture but not a generated or updated TextureAtlas
- Added PixmapPacker.packDirectToTexture() methods.
- API Change: PixmapPacker.generateTextureAtlas(...) now returns an atlas which can be updated with subsequent calls to PixmapPacker.updateTextureAtlas(...)
- API Change: FreeTypeFontGenerator.generateFont(...) now works with a user-provided PixmapPacker.
- Added DirectionalLightsAttribute, PointLightsAttribute and SpotLightsAttribute, removed Environment#directionalLights/pointLights/spotLights, added Environment#remove, lights are now just like any other attribute. See also https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Material-and-environment#lights
- API Change: BitmapFont metrics now respect padding. #3074
- Update bullet wrapper to v2.83
- Added AnimatedTiledMapTile.getFrameTiles() method

Let us know if you run into any issues. See this wiki article on how to update your libGDX project to the latest version. The current libGDX version is “1.6.0”, the current nightly version is “1.6.1-SNAPSHOT”, OR you can just check our versions page which details all the versions of dependencies as well.

If you ever thought “I love all this free libGDX stuff, how can i contribute back?” then you got multiple options:

Take part in the libGDX community, spread your knowledge (like /u/serapth) and maybe even send a pull request.

Did i mention that RoboVM is still free to use as before? No strings attached. A license just gives you new features like Interface Builder support, not usually relevant to game devs. You don’t have to pay us a dime to use it with libGDX (or a normal iOS app). So there’s that.

That 50% discount offer ends tomorrow. Help put some food on my table

One more thing before i leave: if you like libGDX but always found the lack of a code-centric WYSIWYG editor disturbing, check out [Overlap2D](http://overlap2d.com/). It’s fully OSS now, so jump in, contribute, make it awesome, NAO!